Advances in technology have allowed for increasingly complex features to be integrated into mobile terminals. As more and more devices are powerful enough to access and display Internet content, various ways of connecting these devices to one another and to the Internet have been devised. It is common for devices to have the capability to access networks such as the Internet via cellular networks, such as Third Generation (3G) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, or by wireless protocols such as the 802.11 network family.
However, these network access methods require a central provisioning authority, such as a cellular tower or a wireless router. As such, network-enabled devices are constrained by the availability of these central authorities. In response, new network models have been developed to provide these devices with increased access and flexibility. One such model is the “infinite link layer” model that represents all devices in an ad-hoc network environment, where devices may directly communicate with one another and forward network data. In such an environment, devices are not constrained by central connections to, for example, a single wireless router. In contrast, a single device may be able to connect with multiple devices, some of which may be routers that provide access to a traditional packet-switched Internet Protocol network, such as the Internet. If the device wishes to communicate with the Internet, a particular wireless router must be chosen. However, the infinite link layer provides unique challenges in the selection of such routers, because a given device may not be able to address every router available on the infinite link network. In practice, there may be some nodes of the network that cannot ever speak to one another due to packet replication limits (e.g., limiting a given message to a particular number of “hops” to conserve network bandwidth). As such, traditional methods for router selection (e.g., choosing from a list of preferred routers) may not be applicable, since the device may not have access to certain routers, due to the routers being more than the maximum number of hops away from the device.